What the remark exposed was how thoroughly those terms had been lost, not through any single replacement of them, but through the gradual layering of a different set of assumptions over them, week by week, until they were buried under something that looked like reality.
This is how a lot of things go wrong in shared arrangements. Not through a dramatic renegotiation, not through a hostile takeover, but through the patient accumulation of precedents that were never agreed to but were permitted long enough to feel established.
I permitted them. This is my account, and my account includes: I permitted them.
I permitted them until a lunch in late October when someone said you are the guest in a sentence that was not about me and also entirely about me, and I looked at my husband who heard the sentence and did not answer it, and I ate the rest of my lunch and then I spent ten days deciding something.
What I decided was: I live here.
Everything else followed from that.